Asking prices

[Uncle Jimmy]

Whatever asking prices may be I know I'm hopeless at any form of bargaining so I inevitably loose money on all the cars I buy/sell.

Having said that, who wants to go through life seeing everything in terms of money? If that's how you behave you'll never have the things you genuinely want just the things that were a 'bargain'.

I don't see car, or for that matter, house ownership as a money making scheme. In the case of cars they are either an A to B exercise or preferably a fun if expensive hobby...

[Captain Furious]

That's the way the cookie crumbles..he should have been in there earlier.

 

I don't buy into the mentality that just because you got something cheap you are automatically obliged to sell it to the next guy at the same price.  I had a £200 Mk3 Mondeo once which was blatantly worth far more, I just dropped on lucky.  All through my ownership a friend of a friend was on at me to sell it to him when I was finished with it, on the automatic assumption that he would get it for £200 also.

 

Got written off in the end so didn't become an issue.

[dome]

I had some fucking douchebag on a Saab forum many years ago tell me my 9000 Aero wasn't worth £900 as he knew someone (trader) who'd got it for £400 therefore that was what it was worth. I got my £900 no problem from someone in the real world.

[New POD]

I know that some people on one make forums are very cagey about how much they paid for cars, because they either have lied to the wife about how much it was, or they intend flogging it on after a few months, once they've polished it.

[MarvinsMom]

acording to WBAC.com the rover is worth a mighty £120....

 

shame as i had hoped it was worth maybe £500, given that i guess i'm going to be driving it until either it, or me drops.

 

which is no real hardship!

[Uncle Jimmy]

I know that some people on one make forums are very cagey about how much they paid for cars, because they either have lied to the wife about how much it was, or they intend flogging it on after a few months, once they've polished it.

Exactamundo! Outside of this site you'll rarely hear anyone admit to a hefty loss or buying a car way over priced. I've a feeling there'll be some sore loosers coming up soon though...

[New POD]

Mind you it's a pisser when your Dad tries it on.

 

2 months ago my Dad - 80 years old next week, decided to buy an ex show room 10 mile only Focus automatic estate, in red.  He told me it was "only £18000" which is over £4K off the new price.

 

Would I like to buy his old Focus off him. 

 

Now he's asking me this because during the Scrappage scheme, he bought this 1.8 TITanium 59 reg estate whilst trading in his old 51 reg 2.0 Ghia Estate for £1200.  I offered him my astra (value Â£500, until I wrote it off when for some reason the insurance co thought it was worth £800), or rather I suggested he give me the money minus £1200 and I'd buy the new focus, and then swap it for his old one, and scrappage the astra. But for some reason he just went ahead and bought it part exing the old one.  I had a right go at him, hence him ringing me up to offer me the 59 Reg one. Now it's got a few dents, and in 75K he'd NEVER washed it or polished it, and he fixed the broken clip on the dash board cubby hole with a self tapping screw and a piece of old plastic screwed into the dash, so WBAC would knock money off their first quote of £3K. 

 

His offer to me was that I could buy it for what the main dealer offered him in part ex.  Obviously it would be inflated, so I said to ask them how much off without the px?  Given that I want a Dad's favourite son discount, and I don't want a manual, I was intrigued as to what he would offer it to his BEST son for.

 

£3800 was the eventual figure.

 

He seemed upset when I offered £1000, but I know he could have afforded to give it to me, and wouldn't that minimise inheritance tax ?

[Cavcraft]

Sometimes I'm utterly convinced people deliberately overprice stuff for a reason. The garage or enthusiast with a few Mk1 Golfs or 205GTis might like to advertise one or two for stupid amounts. This leads then to those simpletons who start saying 'there's a Mk1 Swallowtail Golf on eBay for £20,000' so mine must be worth Â£12,000. Even in the cases where the expensive ones maybe are reasonable value for money because someone's spent an absolute mint on them, or they're genuine umolested low mileage ones, the morons just see a  ar and a price and decide their's is worth a mint.

 

Imho that's the reason Golf GTis, VW camper vans, Mk1 Escorts, 205 GTis and 'series'/older LandRovers are the prices they are. Are any of those really worth 5/10/15 grand? Of course not, they're good enough things in their own right but they're just pretty ordinary cars that have been 'price hyped' to stupid levels. I can live with that in the case of the cars I'm not even remotely interested in, but when stuff like 205s and LandRovers are fetching stupid money, it spoils it for those of us who want to buy one just to enjoy.

[Kiltox]

Mind you it's a pisser when your Dad tries it on.

 

2 months ago my Dad - 80 years old next week, decided to buy an ex show room 10 mile only Focus automatic estate, in red. He told me it was "only £18000" which is over £4K off the new price.

 

Would I like to buy his old Focus off him.

 

Now he's asking me this because during the Scrappage scheme, he bought this 1.8 TITanium 59 reg estate whilst trading in his old 51 reg 2.0 Ghia Estate for £1200. I offered him my astra (value £500, until I wrote it off when for some reason the insurance co thought it was worth £800), or rather I suggested he give me the money minus £1200 and I'd buy the new focus, and then swap it for his old one, and scrappage the astra. But for some reason he just went ahead and bought it part exing the old one. I had a right go at him, hence him ringing me up to offer me the 59 Reg one. Now it's got a few dents, and in 75K he'd NEVER washed it or polished it, and he fixed the broken clip on the dash board cubby hole with a self tapping screw and a piece of old plastic screwed into the dash, so WBAC would knock money off their first quote of £3K.

 

His offer to me was that I could buy it for what the main dealer offered him in part ex. Obviously it would be inflated, so I said to ask them how much off without the px? Given that I want a Dad's favourite son discount, and I don't want a manual, I was intrigued as to what he would offer it to his BEST son for.

 

£3800 was the eventual figure.

 

He seemed upset when I offered £1000, but I know he could have afforded to give it to me, and wouldn't that minimise inheritance tax ?

Must've been a hell of a profit in the car he bought for them to offer that much for his PX!

[Kiltox]

Sometimes I'm utterly convinced people deliberately overprice stuff for a reason. The garage or enthusiast with a few Mk1 Golfs or 205GTis might like to advertise one or two for stupid amounts. This leads then to those simpletons who start saying 'there's a Mk1 Swallowtail Golf on eBay for £20,000' so mine must be worth £12,000. Even in the cases where the expensive ones maybe are reasonable value for money because someone's spent an absolute mint on them, or they're genuine umolested low mileage ones, the morons just see a ar and a price and decide their's is worth a mint.

 

Imho that's the reason Golf GTis, VW camper vans, Mk1 Escorts, 205 GTis and 'series'/older LandRovers are the prices they are. Are any of those really worth 5/10/15 grand? Of course not, they're good enough things in their own right but they're just pretty ordinary cars that have been 'price hyped' to stupid levels. I can live with that in the case of the cars I'm not even remotely interested in, but when stuff like 205s and LandRovers are fetching stupid money, it spoils it for those of us who want to buy one just to enjoy.

Agreed - saw a Series 3 Land Rover for £11500 the other day - granted it was very nice but it wasn't 10x the one I sold a couple of years ago (which still had profit in it)

[Doctormop]

_{The last car I advertised (local paper classified ads) was a 1992 Jaguar Sovereign 4.0 auto, 10 months mot, 4 months tax (remember when you could buy a taxed vehicle) I'd bought it 2 months previously for £400, an ebay ad with hardly any info, took a gamble and won it. The car was much better than described, stacks of service history, one or two rusty bits but drove fine, I advertised it for £600, got a call straight away, bloke wanted to come and have a look, he never got out of his car, phoned me back and said, the sunroof is starting to rust, it's not for me, had a few more calls, another chap arranged to come that weekend, would be buyer number one phones back and offers £300 because it's not really worth that much with all that rust, I say no thanks, he goes up to 350 but is doing me a favour, second bloke turns up, knows what he is on about, offers 575 and we do the deal, the week after original prick rings back saying he has 300 and will be round in 20 minutes, I tell him to come round by all means and admire the XJ40 sized space outside the house, he gets all arsey as apparently we had all but arranged a deal and he would have given me 500, I tell him that I got the full asking price and dealt with a human being not a time wasting gobshite, he assures me I haven't heard the last of this.}

_{Two months later I see an ad in the same paper for a Citroen Xantia, familiar looking phone number so I phone up at 4.30am, leave a message as I'm super interested leaving the 99p sim card number that I purchased the day before, he phones back telling me how wonderful the car is and I keep him on the phone for 24 minutes asking him to rev the engine to 6000rpm whilst holding the phone against the top of the front wing to check for sphere rattle and asking al kinds of made up questions regarding the LHM fluid and if its genuine Citroen made in mon matre or cheap Lithuanian tractor oil. Hopefully he is still waiting for me to jump on the Eurostar and collect cash on collection.}

[Snipes]

The eBay optimists make me laugh. Who do they think will pay £5k for a '94 Primera or £2.5k for a '93 Escort LX?

[trigger]

What about £8500 for a boggo Cortina Estate?.

 

http://www.carandclassic.co.uk/car/C781835

 

The world has gone mad.

[New POD]

Must've been a hell of a profit in the car he bought for them to offer that much for his PX!

 

I've no idea, but cars have less parts these days, and are 'value engineered' to the bone, so with one less piston, 4 less valves, you'd think it would cost less to make. But if RRP is £22K and Internet Price is £16.5K,  the possibility of selling a One owner car (once given half a day's TLC) off the forecourt at about what you gave in trade in, which facilitates £2K more profit in the new one, you sold to the owner, well, you may as well use trade in price to suck the old fart in.

What they loose on the trade in they gain on the overall profit I think.

[Kiltox]

I've no idea, but cars have less parts these days, and are 'value engineered' to the bone, so with one less piston, 4 less valves, you'd think it would cost less to make. But if RRP is £22K and Internet Price is £16.5K, the possibility of selling a One owner car (once given half a day's TLC) off the forecourt at about what you gave in trade in, which facilitates £2K more profit in the new one, you sold to the owner, well, you may as well use trade in price to suck the old fart in.

What they loose on the trade in they gain on the overall profit I think.

Ex rental probably so even more profit in it

 

I'm buying a Clio from my gaffer tomorrow at trade money (CAP clean and it's worth it) - he was offered up to £500 over my bid by main dealers (and up to the same below) depending on what car he wanted to buy

[warren t claim]

What's wrong with making a profit?

[Kiltox]

What's wrong with making a profit?

Nothing at all, I do it regularly

 

The smoke and mirrors approach to part ex values doesn't do anyone any favours though!

[Tamworthbay]

The trade in scam has always been the same, my father in law has our old Passat estate and has just been offered £400 against a BMW 1 series (not new), I went in and gently haggled a bit and was offered £500 off the ticket price for cash, so they were charging him £100 for the pleasure of taking the car. They would just bang it to auction anyway and wouldn't be looking at making on it, just a way to get a punter in and some people don't like the hassle of selling a car, especially for a few hundred quid.

[BavarianRetro]

But to be fair to the dealer, that £400 is probably a good chunk of the gross profit in a second hand one series.

 

Then they've got to trade or auction the Passat, if it's not the sort of thing they retail, tying up someone's time and resources to get that and all the DVLA paperwork attended to, and possibly get it to the auction where it'll sell for pennies less the comission.

 

They're probably, genuinely £100 better off giving you £500 off than taking the Passat and an extra £100.

[Tamworthbay]

I agree apart from the tying up someone's time bit, most second hand car dealers have a lot of spare time on their hands. We used a local place for many years as he was an old school truly genuine guy of the sort very rare in the second hand car trade. After he retired and sold the business (sadly to a dodgy car lot type who did well for a while on his reputation even though the name changed) we saw him at a local village fair displaying these amazing scratch built models of all sorts of things. We got chatting and it turned out he had been doing for years at work when no one was looking at cars. The portacabin he used had two sides and You would never have guessed in a million years what was in the other half!

[Bren]

Over inflating the price of a classic or something that is on the up is one thing.

 

Overinflating the price of a common a shite eurobox is another.Unless it really stands out.